Washington State Issues Evacuation Orders for 100,000 Amid Floods

Current conditions: A series of clipper storms blowing southeastward from Alberta are set to deliver the first measurable amount of snow to the Interstate 95 corridor in the coming days • Planes, trains, and ferries are facing cancellations in Scotland as Storm Bram makes landfall with 70-mile-per-hour winds • In India’s northern Punjab region, a cold snap is creating such a dense fog that travel is being disrupted in some areas.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Washington State issues evacuation orders for 100,000 as rivers rise

For the past few days, I have written about alarming forecasts of flooding in the Pacific Northwest as back-to-back atmospheric rivers deluged the region. On Thursday, it became clear just how severe the crisis is becoming, as Washington State issued an urgent order to evacuate more than 100,000 residents, according to The New York Times. Several days of rain have swollen rivers and streams in the Skagit Valley, roughly halfway between Seattle and the Canadian border, putting everyone in the area within a 100-year flood plain. “You can stand downtown here and just see whole Doug firs and cottonwood trees coming down the river, like a freight train,” James Eichner, who fled floodwaters near the Snohomish River farm where he works, told the newspaper. “It’s just a giant steamroller.”

While it’s still difficult to link specific weather events to climate change, federal researchers have connected intensified atmospheric rivers to the planet’s rising temperatures. But the record heat the world has experienced over the past three years isn’t necessarily due entirely to global warming. In a new analysis published in Carbon Brief, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather found that the main culprits turn out to be a combination of El Niño effects, declining sulfur emissions from Chinese coal plants and global shipping no longer masking warming, and stronger than usual solar radiation.

2. Trump insists China isn’t beating the U.S. on electricity deployments

Solar panels and wind turbines in Zhangjiakou in China's Hebei province.Photo by VCG

China’s success at building new power plants has earned the country the title of the world’s first “electrostate,” a play on the old petrostate moniker afforded to nations where vast domestic oil and gas resources dominate the economy and politics. In the People’s Republic, blue-gray solar panels glaze entire mountainsides, nuclear reactors come online faster than the U.S. can pick a site for one, and wind turbines spring from the ground. In America, meanwhile, power-thirsty data centers are forced to jury-rig on-site power plants made of old jet engines. But that’s not how President Donald Trump sees it. In response to a Wall Street Journal story outlining how China’s vast grid is boosting Beijing’s artificial intelligence ambitions, Trump posted on his Truth Social website that the newspaper was “WRONG.” He went on: “Every AI plant being built in the United States is building its own Electric Generating Facilities. The approvals are being given carefully, but very quickly, a matter of weeks. Any excess Electricity being produced is going to our Electric Grid, which is being strengthened, and expanded, for other purposes than AI, like never before. In other words, AI has far more Electricity than they will ever need.”

The outburst came as Trump’s approval ratings on the economy sunk to the lowest point ever recorded by an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll taken while he’s been in office. Just 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, down from 40% in March.

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3. Rivan bets on self-driving cars

Like Tesla, electric vehicle giant Rivian is making a bet on self-driving cars. On Thursday, the company outlined what TechCrunch called “an ambitious effort that includes new hardware, including lidar and custom silicon, and eventually, a potential entry into the self-driving ride-hail market.” The automaker made the announcements at its inaugural “Autonomy & AI Day” event in Palo Alto, where the publication said the company sent “a very public signal to shareholders that it’s keeping pace, or even exceeding, the automated-driving capabilities of industry rivals like Tesla, Ford, General Motors, as well as automakers from Europe and China.”

It’s just the latest extension of Rivian’s empire. In March, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported that the company spun off its micromobility division. The startup, named Also, announced a $105 million Series B round on the same day it went independent.

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4. House passes three permitting reform bills

The Republican-led House of Representatives voted largely along partisan lines to pass three bills Thursday designed to speed up permitting for energy projects. While Politico noted the bills are unlikely to be taken up in the Senate, the package managed to pick up six Democrats’ votes in favor of a provision to ease Section 401 Clean Water Act rules and boost pipeline construction. Earlier this week, a bipartisan bill to modernize the federal permitting process and prepare to digitize the experience passed unanimously.

Heatmap’s Jael Holzman broke the news this week that the top three Senate Democrats focused on climate issues oppose another permitting reform bill with bipartisan support, the SPEED Act, on the grounds that it did too little to clear bottlenecks for renewables and transmission lines. For those hoping a long-anticipated bipartisan legislative push may finally come to fruition before tax credits expire for solar and wind projects, at least one thing is clear: A negotiation is underway.

5. EU announces two-pronged plan to overhaul the power grid

The European Commission proposed what PV Tech called a “two-pronged approach to improving Europe’s energy infrastructure.” The plan aims to speed up and make more transparent the process for permitting projects related to the grid. The proposal also calls for establishing eight new “energy highways” to deliver transmission capacity to areas of “strategic importance” in the 27-nation bloc. The first part, called the “European Grids Package,” calls for creating the Trans-European Network for Energy, or TEN-E, that was first proposed in 2013. The report also noted how far behind Europe was on its previous targets. Despite a goal of 88 gigawatts of new cross-border electricity transmission capacity by 2030, the EU is on pace to build just 41 gigawatts.

The move comes days after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen notched a victory for her deregulatory agenda when her center-right coalition in the European Parliament broke taboos and teamed up with the far-right to pass legislation easing environmental rules on most companies. As a result of the change, as I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, 80% of businesses operating in the EU will no longer have to track and report their own environmental impacts.

THE KICKER

Deep in the cloud forests of the Serra do Quiriri mountains in the southern Brazilian Atlantic Forest, scientists discovered an entirely new species of frog. Named Brachycephalus lulai, the tiny amphibian has pumpkin-orange skin with green and brown freckles and obsidian eyes. Males max out at a little over 11 millimeters, while females grow nearly 14 millimeters. They are, according to Phys.org, “among the smallest four-legged animals on Earth.” What makes the discovery so interesting is that the researchers identified the so-called “pumpkin toadlet” by its unique mating song, unlike any known species in its genus, which consists of two short bursts of sound, according to their paper in the journal PLOS One.